Legacies of Post-Imperial Migrations from World War I to the Cold War

The routes of migration in the "Long" twentieth century form passages through which not only people have changed their location, but also the material and immaterial goods which they have taken with them. Such representations of migration can freeze positive memories of that which needs preservation or melancholic memories of an often dramatic migration experience taking place in a distant world. This is certainly the case for tens of millions of people from the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Empires. The variable waves of migration subjects of these empires constitute a flurry of transformative experiences that have left their imprint well into the Cold War era. It is time to consider what can be salvaged from these events and analyzed in critically new ways.